


i think i wanna stay in the car

by clean



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, Gay Jughead Jones, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Internalized Homophobia, Mental Health Issues, Multi, occasionally meta-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24177688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clean/pseuds/clean
Summary: Betty Cooper has been in love with Archie Andrews since she was 8 years old,Jughead types out, the opening line of his novel. It isn’t right. He deletes it.Jughead Jones has been in love with,he pauses, hovers over the delete button, continues withBetty Cooper since he was 8 years old.Perfect.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones, Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 10
Kudos: 87





	i think i wanna stay in the car

**Author's Note:**

> as a content warning of sorts, this fic includes discussions of depression/past suicide attempts/internalized homophobia. "implied cheating" refers to mentions of b/a
> 
> idk what this is... i haven't posted riverdale fic since i was 15 and projecting and i may not be 15 anymore but nothing else has changed i'm still projecting
> 
> sometimes it's just like. *thinks of your life as a creative writing assignment to cope*

_Betty Cooper has been in love with Archie Andrews since she was 8 years old,_ Jughead types out, the opening line of the next chapter of his novel. It isn’t right. He deletes it.

 _Jughead Jones has been in love with,_ he pauses, hovers over the delete button, continues with _Betty Cooper since he was 8 years old._ Perfect.

There are a lot of things that Jughead doesn’t like to think about but often ends up thinking about anyways: How long his dad must have had to wash his hands to get Jason Blossom’s blood off of them. The moment Riverdale changed for the worse. Where his mom is. How long he’s been in love with Betty Cooper.

That one’s the easiest to think about, but only relatively. He’s been in love with Betty forever. He must have been, because nothing else can explain his constant presence on the corner of 3rd and Elm. But it was always Archie that Alice wanted for Betty, over and over again, first in her joking comments about how _Archie proposed to Betty today with a little plastic ring, how cute is that? Wouldn’t it just be so cute if they got together when they were older?_ and then in the looks she started to give him and the way she and his father got into screaming matches when it was FP’s turn to pick him up, only once every few months really; he actively tried to avoid going anywhere on the Northside with Jughead.

 _She just doesn’t see how awesome you are,_ Betty once told him, because her mom had said that Jughead was a “lowlife from a family of lowlifes”, as if ten years old was too young to understand her. Betty had hugged him and stroked his hair as if he was just like her orange tabby cat and maybe she only did it because he was there when her mom said it, maybe because usually they only talked through Archie and Archie hadn’t been there to defend him. _Someday someone will see how awesome you are,_ Betty had said, and he may not have realized it back then but at age sixteen Jughead decides that this is when he must have fallen in love with Betty for the first time. 

  
  
  


The truth is that the day in the diner, his birthday, he knew there was something wrong. The words didn’t quite work out right, but he was honest when he told Betty he was scared of being rejected, of being himself, of something bigger than himself that he couldn’t quite define yet. 

When she shows him her hands he kisses them as if that’ll make the scars go away, and silently feels horrible for his outburst earlier that night. He may have told the truth, but it was cruel—even he can recognize that, what with the little social skills he does have.

But he’s right. Archie does come back around about the whole Betty thing, later, and Jughead blames himself a little. Maybe if he had tried a little harder, maybe if he had said “I love you” a couple more times, God, maybe if he had just done his homework and not paid attention to the insanity of Riverdale for a couple weeks, just settled down and finished those essays…he’s not sad about it, exactly, but he feels like if he tried enough he could make himself sad about it. He just can’t bring himself to generate the correct emotion about it all. 

At grad practice, somewhere around two and a half years after the night in the diner, they’re waiting for yet _another_ keynote speaker to load up his presentation from a USB drive. _Why so many, Riverdale High? What is this, the Oscars?_ He’s talking to Kevin, because of course he is, what with J and K being right next to each other in the last-name arrangement. Then Kevin makes some offhand remark calling him “Mr. I’m-Weird-I’m-A-Weirdo”, and it makes him unbelievably angry.

“Where the hell did you hear that from?” he asks. Kevin just looks sympathetic.

“Betty told me about it sophomore year. Sorry for bringing it up, it was just a joke,” he says, genuinely apologetic, and Jughead looks up to the front row of their senior class, where Betty and Archie occasionally shoot each other longing glances across everyone with a last name starting with B. It feels violating, to have that speech out there in the world. Maybe Kevin and Betty can laugh at it, and maybe Kevin thinks he’s sensitive about Betty, but Jughead knows what he was really trying to say with _how different we are_ and _on a cellular DNA kind of level_ and _one of your projects._ It’s not worth getting mad over, though.

“I just want to graduate and get the fuck out of here,” Jughead says, and Kevin nods empathetically.

“I get it,” he says. Jughead thinks of the Farm and Moose’s father’s attempted cult-homicide hate crime in the Stonewall school newspaper and Midge pinned to the _Carrie_ set piece and what Jason’s body might’ve looked like in the river at night and thinks _Kevin Keller might be the only person in this town who really does get it._

  
  
  


Betty and Archie don’t date. Jughead isn’t sure if that makes it better or worse, but they don’t. The summer before they all go off to college, Veronica leaves all their group chats and doesn’t bother explaining herself, and Mary tells FP and Alice at one of their parent-dinners that Archie’s not going to the Naval Academy. Jughead isn’t supposed to hear it so he heads back up the stairs and decides not to mention it to anyone except Betty.

She laughs coldly. “Yeah, after all these years he still can’t stick with a choice for shit,” she says. 

“I just thought you’d want to know,” Jughead says, and closes her door behind him. They talk all the time because they have to. He knows that if things keep going the way they’re going that they’re bound to become step siblings at some point, so he stays civil even though it feels like he’s hearing her say _I’m sorry, it just kind of…happened_ every time she opens her mouth.

It could hurt more, but when you’ve known something was inevitable for so long it’s hard to act surprised when it actually does _just kind of happen._

  
  
  
  


The truth is, Jughead has never, ever wanted to be in the spotlight. He had been counting on not being the center of attention until his own wedding, and hopefully not even then. But sometimes it’s fun to imagine it, because imagination-Jughead is much more outgoing and fun than reality-Jughead. He’d be imagination-Jughead all the time if he could.

There’s this one memory, another from the list of not-fun-things-to-think-about, not as hard to think about as his parents are, but hard nonetheless—junior prom. It’s this clear memory, like a movie you’ve watched a million times: his eyes flicker over to the two thrones on the auditorium stage. For a second he lets himself fantasize about winning the crown for real, except in his fantasy, at least, imagination-Jughead's fantasy, it’s Archie next to him and not Betty, and everyone’s so happy for them, and everyone’s talking about how they’re _inseparable basically since birth, isn’t that so cute_ . He imagines their imagination-first dance, probably to some dumb old slow song that everyone knows, _Thinking Out Loud_ or _Your Song_ or something, and as it fades out, Archie laughs and moves—

 _Woah,_ imagination-Jughead thinks, because even he has limits. _Little far there, huh?_ Besides, if any two guys deserve to win one of them really should be Kevin. He’s the one who actually contributes to the student body, and he’s probably in the 97th percentile on the SAT, and all the teachers love him, and he’s the president of Riverdale’s drama department.

Jughead especially tries not to think about imagination-Jughead and what his orientation may or may not be. There’s a reason he’s called imagination-Jughead.

  
  
  


Fall semester has a lot of sleepless nights. Jughead meets with the university’s counseling service once and they almost automatically recommend for him to see a private psychiatrist in Iowa City at the very least once a week, and remind him that there are certain things that will get him put in an involuntary psych hold. He doesn’t think he’s said anything too serious in his thirty-minute evaluation, but it might just be that the “Riverdale, NY” in the “hometown” section of his file was too intimidating for the on-campus counselors.

He spends most nights writing. Not his high-school novel, finally something not on the Google Doc he transferred his Jason Blossom novel to when he got his new laptop. Sometimes it’s poetry or flash fiction for his workshop classes, more often he just writes until he can’t anymore.

 _I don’t like sex,_ Jughead writes out one night. The comments on his r/relationships post (which goes through all the crazy details of his adolescence, including but not limited to his gang involvement, possible love triangle with his best friend and half-half sibling, and his drug-related obsession with being a tabletop game master) all think he’s trolling and a few selectively disastrous lines of it later get memed on Twitter, while the r/asexuality comments don’t give him anything insightful besides _Sounds like you’re asexual! Congrats!_ He appreciates the efforts but he’s looking for genuine comments, and yes, maybe it’s a lot to ask a bunch of strangers to analyze your sexuality in the context of your extensive childhood trauma over the internet but it was worth a try at least.

  
  
  


The truth is that the first night in Toledo, Archie had fallen asleep first. Jughead had stayed awake staring at the wall, not trusting himself not to look over at him if he faced the other way. It felt the same way it had when he would wake up first at sleepovers just to lie on the air mattress with his eyes open.

 _I always knew,_ his mom had said, as if there was anything for her to know. While she handed him a few blankets to take for the spare room she’d poked fun at him for defending Archie from JB’s teasing advances.  
“Not like you need to,” she’d said, “that boy is too in love with you to even care.”

“Jesus, mom,” he’d told her, “you can’t just say things like that.”

“You can if they’re true.”

“Yeah, but not if they aren’t.” His mom had just rolled her eyes, but that night he hadn’t been able to sleep right, wondering if maybe Betty had ever told Alice _I’m_ never _going to ditch Archie, mom_ or something similar. He thinks that a little bit of Betty lives on in him even when she’s not around, and maybe that’s why he journeyed to Ohio across the entirety of Pennsylvania when he was supposed to be in school, or why he couldn’t see past his whole G&G haze until Archie stumbled down the bunker and into his arms.

Sleep takes a while.

  
  
  


Archie had been so persuasive the day Jughead left Riverdale in time to move in for freshman year. It wasn’t even anything he’d said; he’d just pressed a piece of paper into his hand and told him _it’s my new number, please, take it,_ when they hadn’t spoken all summer. Jughead had accepted it, put it in his pocket and waited until mid-September to text.

 _hey,_ he’d said.

 _Hi :),_ Archie had replied without asking who it was. Presumably, he’d added Jughead’s number to his new phone and waited for him to send a message first.

It’s considerate. But it’s Archie, so that shouldn’t be… _too_ much of a surprise.

But slipping back into being best friends with Archie is easier than Jughead had thought it would be. Maybe it’s the history, maybe it’s that old habits die hard. They even video-call sometimes, even though Jughead kind of hates showing his face on camera if he’s not actually required to, but Archie is obsessed with reading facial expressions or something. He’s always making Jughead put down his work and press play at the same time on some dumb movie or another so that he can listen and occasionally laugh while Jughead picks apart the plot holes. Jughead complains about his productivity going down whenever Archie talks to him but the truth is that the breaks are welcomed, and anyway, he’s never written more. Seriously. It’s like words keep pouring out of his mind even when he’s not trying to write anything.

He wants to hate Archie, a little bit, but he really hasn’t thought about the whole cheating thing as much he’s thought about…literally everything else. And anyway, Archie spends at least half an hour a day, sometimes in the middle of movie time, trying to figure out how to make it up to him.

“Archie, you messed up, I get it. But you don’t need to keep apologizing,” he tells him halfway through _The Phantom Menace._ (Terrible film choice on Archie’s part.)

“No, seriously. I’m so sorry. And I just feel even worse that it came between _us,_ because It’s just that I don’t even like Betty like that. I didn’t love her, and I don’t, and I don’t think I’ve ever liked anyone the way…I’m _supposed_ to, at least.” Archie looks uncertain. “Do you get what I’m trying to say here?”

“Um…yeah,” Jughead says, and moves on to talking about Anakin’s arc as if that didn’t shift the ground underneath them.

 _Jughead Jones has been in love with,_ he types at the top of the page later that night. Doesn’t finish the sentence. It feels a little pathetic, but a lot more honest than last time.

  
  
  


When Jughead is newly sixteen he really tells someone about how much he hates it all for the first time, Betty, when they’re walking home together. He’s angry that people think they can come after her, like McCoy and Weatherbee, when they’re supposed to be coming after him, like Keller, and his social worker…Betty isn’t who they want. She doesn’t deserve that. “I don’t belong here, so why don’t I just do everyone a favor and—”

“Hey,” Betty says. “This is your home,” she tells him, won’t let go of his face until he says yes. He says yes, repeats it so that she believes it. When she turns away he feels guilty, like the whole idea was just to bait her, to manipulate her, like he just wanted to feel pity from someone besides himself.

They’re halfway through the cemetery and it’s snowing. There’s probably some sort of irony involved in the whole scenario.

 _If you got it,_ he thinks bitterly, _you wouldn’t have published that article,_ and feels bad for thinking it. Sometimes it feels like he’s drowning, and Betty’s drowning, and every time he tries to help Betty onto a lifeboat he just inhales more water, but she doesn’t even realize that he’s not already on the lifeboat—a convoluted metaphor, sure, but Jughead thinks it works.

  
  
  


The truth is that on the fifth of July, in the liminal space between freshman and sophomore year, Jughead went to Sweetwater Bridge and stood there for two hours. The railing would’ve been easy enough to climb over, but there was the whole issue of him already knowing how to swim. And it wasn’t cold enough to contract hypothermia. So it’d just have been a whole event of getting his clothes wet and having to head back to the Southside soaked with no change of clothing, unless he wanted to get some from the trailer and have to deal with his dad, which he didn’t. So he went home.

In May of senior year he does it again, stands there imagining. He thinks that maybe FP might have a gun somewhere at home, for personal use, not sheriff duties. But it doesn’t feel like he even deserves to die; more so that he deserves to feel the consequences of not being good enough for Betty.

 _Betty Cooper has been in love with Archie Andrews since she was 8 years old,_ he had typed out all those months before. Maybe it was true. There were probably a couple more versions of that sentence he could cycle through that would all be correct, but this version hurts more than the others.

He goes home, again. It’s not worth it.

  
  
  


His first winter break, when he gets back from Iowa, FP and Alice tell him Betty’s not coming back for the holidays. She texts the family group chat, but it’s not really the same. It’s not like she can’t—New Haven is only an hour and a bit away, or something like that, Jughead isn’t sure because it’s been a while since he last bothered to look it up exactly on Google Maps but he can approximate.

Too bad she misses it all. Break is eventful: Christmas morning brings FP gifting Alice an engagement ring. Jughead and Jellybean exchange a meaningful look that says in no words at all _if this is what it takes then so be it._

For New Years, Alice and FP and Mary set up chairs in the Andrews’ backyard. Jellybean actually has a party with friends, so she gives the whole family kisses on their cheeks and wishes everyone a happy new year before she heads out—endlessly more popular at the age of 13 than Jughead ever was.

Eventually the adults migrate inside. Charles is apparently considered an adult, while Jughead gets trapped outside alone with Archie. Turns out there’s no age where it’s socially acceptable to join the grown-up table; as long as you’re the youngest ones there you are, by extension, the kids.

They don’t speak much, even though they’ve been texting a lot over the course of first semester in Archie’s desperate attempt to regain his friendship, definitely more than Betty texts him back which is a bit worrying considering now she’s going to be his stepsister. But in person everything feels all real again, and when Jughead looks at him he sees text-Archie who always asks him to FaceTime because he always makes exceptions for Archie. And he sees reality-Archie who kissed Betty and feels bad about it and doesn’t always know what he wants. And he sees Archie who told him he doesn’t like girls how he’s supposed to and imagination-prom-king-Archie.

Distantly, there’s a countdown winding down. Archie leans in.

“Happy new year,” he whispers, close enough that if he moved even a fraction of an inch closer—

“You too,” Jughead breathes, not trusting himself to string together a sentence longer than two words. Every molecule of his body feels like it’s on fire. That’s not really how science works, but he’s getting an English degree for a reason, anyway. Archie smiles at him and shifts away on the grass. As he moves his arm, it brushes Jughead’s for a millisecond.

 _I think_ maybe _I’d like sex,_ Jughead begins the personal journaling assignment he has to do over break. _But I can’t really be sure yet._

  
  
  


The truth is that Betty doesn’t really come home at all, always caught up in one research project or another in New Haven. As such Jughead’s taken over their old room when he comes back to visit, which is often, because as much as he loves his program he can’t say he wants to stick around in Iowa for longer than he has to. Spring break back home is mostly quiet, and it gives Jughead a lot of time to catch up on his projects before finals week descends upon campus.

 _Hey,_ says the text notification on Jughead’s phone, forcing him to look up from his laptop. Archie waves from where he’s standing at his bedroom window. He has earbuds in and he’s dressed like he just went out, still with his jacket on and all. It’s 11:30. Where did he even go? Archie truly is enigmatic.

 _hey yourself,_ Jughead sends back. _what’s up?_

 _Listen to this song,_ Archie writes, and sends a Spotify link.

_you assume i have spotify_

_Don’t you?_ (He does.)

 _hate you,_ Jughead texts, but he clicks the link. Out of the corner of his eye, Archie makes a throat slitting motion and types something out quickly.

 _No no no we have to press play at the same time,_ Archie sends. _So it’s like we’re listening to it together._

_ok lol._

_3, 2, 1,_ Archie counts down. Jughead presses play on Yellow by Coldplay, which he’d like to say is much more of a Betty song than something he’d ever listen to of his own accord. He still thinks of things like that, more Betty than him, like he’d severed a person in half.

 _I wrote a song for you,_ sings the guy from Coldplay whose name Jughead has never bothered to learn. As he watches, Archie presses his left hand to the glass, slowly, as if he’s testing the material; too hard and the window will fall right through. Jughead’s breath catches in his throat as he reaches up to touch his own window, _Betty’s window,_ he thinks distantly, a mirror image of Archie’s hand. Twenty feet closer and without the two panes of glass he’d be able to fold his fingers over Archie’s and they’d be intertwined.

Jughead exhales, suddenly aware of the now manual process of breathing. Archie smiles at him.

Four small eternities later, the song fades out. Jughead drops his hand and Archie hesitantly follows suit, taking his phone out of his pocket and sending _thanks for listening with me,_ as if Jughead didn’t just spend four minutes reliving every moment he’s overthought in his mind’s eye from age 6 to age 19.

He thinks maybe the sentence that he still hasn’t finished writing in the novel he’ll never publish isn’t true anymore, off-track a little since last May, but with enough time he’ll fall right into it again.

Besides, if he wanted to rewrite it honestly, it’s less like _since he was 8 years old_ and more like _since he was 4._

Old habits die hard, seriously.

  
  
  


Something Jughead has been talking to his therapist about a lot is that he always makes himself a supporting character in his writing, in his life. That he’s unable to process things because he won’t even let himself be a part of the narrative.

His new creative nonfiction piece is the best one he’s ever brought to workshop, according to his classmates, the most real one yet. They analyze it like he’s a character and like Betty and Archie only exist when they orbit around him.

It’s nice to think that he’s the protagonist for once. It may only be a start, but it still feels like he’s retired his old high-school style for the better. Now he gets to speak his mind, all of it—even if that means imagination-Jughead also gets to tell his story.

“I like how the narrator keeps emphasizing these vignettes where he explains what the ‘truth’ is,” one girl says as they discuss the piece. Her name is Ada, or something similar starting with an A, he thinks. “It’s like he wants those pictures of his reality to be the real ones, but even he himself isn’t sure that those are the truth.”

“Yeah,” another girl—Liv? Maybe? She’s new, give him a break—sitting to Jughead’s right cuts in. “It’s like he can’t have those clear images of himself and who he is without also incorporating the image of who he thought he was. That constructed image is just as much a part of him as the real him, along with all the words he leaves unwritten, like the implied true ending of the sentence and his own sexuality…Great work, by the way, Forsythe,” she remarks.

“I think you got what even I couldn’t explain about it,” Jughead says. “Thank you. I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts on this piece. It’s very close to my heart.” Liv pats his shoulder and smiles at him as they move on to discussing the next work.

It’s his last class of the day. As he heads back to his dorm and closes the door to his room, Jughead’s phone chimes with a text: _Night at the Museum 2 tonight? :),_ it reads.

 _LOL ofc :-),_ he sends back. _what time?_

**Author's Note:**

> you know when you're gay and it's a relief that your heterosexual relationship somehow dissolves without you having to come out. yeah. unrelated to that but i do think there should be this version of the window scene because it's about the hands.
> 
> title from rose colored boy - paramore which is on my "mentally ill and to some degree repressed" playlist
> 
> i'm on [tumblr](http://englishmajorjughead.tumblr.com) :~)


End file.
